A lot of people are wondering why Nokia didn't choose to go with Android. How can Nokia differentiate themselves when Android is a lot more open and free than Windows Phone 7? As usual, the key to this is in the details. If you read the announcements carefully, you'll see that Microsoft offered Nokia something Google most likely didn't. Update: What a surprise. Elop just confirmed Nokia has a special deal with Microsoft. Whereas HTC, Samsung, and so on are not allowed to customise WP7 - Nokia is, further confirming my theory.

The one thing you never, ever, ever do is sell off your platform to someone else and place it under their control.

Exactly. Thom clearly does not remember how MS played the Windows NT card back in the day. All the Unix vendors created strategic alliances with MS over Windows NT, placing the focus of the future on Windows NT instead of their own platforms. DEC even had 200+ engineers working on the NT code base to port it all to 64-bit. MS screwed them all over by not properly supporting these platforms and not even porting Office to them. By the time they realized what happened, it was too late.

Smartphones are not about the hardware, but all about the software. Now that Nokia has killed their own software development, the future looks very bleak for Nokia.